


Drowning dry and slow

by Morbane



Category: King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)
Genre: Breathplay, Constructive Criticism Welcome, F/M, Light Femdom, Trust Kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-14
Updated: 2018-04-14
Packaged: 2019-04-22 18:23:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14314503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane





	Drowning dry and slow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alamorn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alamorn/gifts).



Arthur's still getting used to the business of being a king. Long months will go by in which he's sweet-talking merchants and earls and figuring out how to fortify the coast (there is enough coast to make him frequently nostalgic for the days when it wasn't his responsibility), and then... And then. The Mage will sweep in, announcing something that he must do, something _only_ he can do, each task weirder than the last.

He has a suspicion that she does this on purpose, and would be quite happy if she were associated, at Camelot, only with supernatural terror, situations beyond mortal ken, and difficulty for Arthur himself. Having guessed at this early on, he makes sure to react blandly to every new task, smiling broadly at her arrival. He thinks he's confused her. It pleases him.

"The Lady of the Lake is in peril," she announces, her forearms folded on the table surface, after she has asked him to clear the room.

"From what?" he asks reasonably.

She frowns. "It would take a long time to explain. The danger comes - it is not yet here."

He gestures at the empty room. "I'm listening."

Her frown deepens. "For now," she says, "you only need to know that we must help her."

Despite how obvious this tactic is, there is enough tone in her flat voice that his attention is caught. Also, _we_.

"And how are we supposed to do that?"

She considers him. "How long can you hold your breath?"

He breathes out. He tries to do it slowly, casually, but he's too aware of her.

*

The Lady of the Lake has the unerring power to act through any body of fresh water, should the need be great; and this apparently applies to situations when the great need is her own. The Mage informs Arthur that any diver can meet with the Lady - if he descends a hundred feet. Arthur cannot dive that far. 

(He thinks that no one can dive that far, but he does not say it, and so he manages not to sound a fool when, later, a discussion around the Table brings up an eye-opening range of examples. Everyone, apparently, knows of some means of doing this - knows of salvage-divers off the Frankish coast, or pearl-divers in Illyria. Arthur joins in enthusiastically when it's his turn, offering up a clearly fantastical tale, and turns the topic to a scurrilous joke before Sir William can eye him too curiously.)

The Mage has a keen eye and a low tolerance for his doubts. "I can take air with us to further our journey," she says, "but all that you can do will help. Show me."

He takes the deepest breath he can and holds it. She catches his eyes, then, in looking aside, lets go of his gaze, as if it were a mote of dust or strand of hair that, for all of her, can drift to the floor. He's left staring straight ahead, cheeks absurdly swollen, contemplating her.

She's wearing a brilliant red cloak - she loves coloured dress as much as the women who raised him - but it shrinks up from the hem of her green robe, and that's travel-muddied, and the cloak itself has creases in it that suggests she's worn it through sleep and waking over many days.

He starts to chew the air in his mouth for distraction - he's feeling the press of it, and then the urgency of it, and he feels like a fool, darting his eyes around the room - three counts there, and hold, and then three counts there, and hold - he can make it to five more counts, surely.

He makes it to four. He gasps.

"A start," she nods. "Try again, and I will assist."

He does, but he's a little wary about what _assist_ means, so he isn't at the end of his endurance when he takes a breath in -

\- to nothing. There's no air at his mouth. There's a glitter at her eye. Her fingers are slightly outstretched -

Where he's trying to pull air in, something invisibly _pulls back_ , and at that, his control breaks. He claws towards her, driven by an instinct beyond panic, and she winces and steps back as though he's wafting a bad smell over to her.

He can breathe again. He pants.

"I can take air with us," she says again. "By the same means that I can take air where you would not expect to find it, I can take it away."

He supposes that's quite generous of her, really, explaining. He's still panting - approximating one of the creatures whose mastery she claims.

He's glad the room is empty. In front of her, he can gasp. If the Round Table were fully occupied, he'd be ducking underneath it about now. The principle of not betraying your weaknesses dies very hard; it may die harder than he will.

But it's easier to struggle in front of the ineffable Mage.

*

He's ready for the second time, but he still isn't remotely ready. He's holding his breath to a minute now, or so the lines confirm on the finest water- and candle-clocks that are furnished to a king, and then he takes a breath and there's nothing, again...

Tears start into his eyes; his head is throbbing; his throat feels as though it's tearing across. He pitches forward. He reaches for her.

She gives him nothing. She blurs in front of his eyes. He staggers.

He comes to, to a knocking on his head from within, and to a hand planted on her kneeling skirts - she caught him as he fell, and kneels with him.

Later, he thinks: so this is another way a mage can kill. A quiet, intimate means of execution, tidy, but - he's seen a strangled body in his time, and many drowned - not pretty. 

It changes nothing. If hers were the last face he saw, it must be because he had failed her.

*

Again. It's no less painful, but he can push the panic down further, and in its place is something strange and buoyant, as though magic has taken the air that he can breathe away from in front of his face and instead threaded it through his mind.

*

Each last moment before he takes a breath stretches agonisingly longer and longer - a rack of the mind and lungs - but before the world fades, it dances before his eyes; on dry land, he floats. He thinks about writing policy in this state. Laws against violence. Landlords. Lilies. Legerdemain...

But the world shrinks, too, until only he and she are in it. His dizzy mind cannot reach beyond this room.

He holds his breath as long as he can, because to open his mouth and find nothing and gasp is worse, and he think she knows it.

(He tells her it's worse. She's pleased. His first instinct is to be pleased that she is pleased, and his second instinct is not to show it, and that second one is the one he represses. He likes her smugness. One of them ought to be having fun. 

But that too is a dissemblance - they both are.)

One session knocks him prone, face an inch away from the palace's lovely patterned marble floor. He'd get up but he can't. Her hand on the back of his neck isn't any kind of comfort, but it does seem to acknowledge this.

 _Again_ , until he could almost forget why they're doing this, forget anything else.

**

When he dreams of her, they're in the water. He reaches out to trail his hands through her hair, and rushes slide through his fingers. She holds the sword and plunges it into his burning throat, all the way to the hilt, until her knuckles on the hilt brush his skin. Then the sword is gone and only her hands are there, smoothing over the wound to become nothing.

*

He learns not to hold his cheeks taut like an iron-bound barrel, and instead to just-purse his lips, letting her magic draw the breath slowly, thinly out of him as if she is one of his fancywork smiths drawing a golden wire. 

It's been a long time since he reached for her as he weakened, and so now she waits within reach. Sometimes she sits at the Round Table and mends a bag or a skirt, or writes. He keeps his gasps in as long as he can, stifles the high noises that escape him, and even when he's successful, she doesn't seem to need to look at him to know when he's reaching floating heights.

She's stopped taking it to the point where he passes out. Whatever lesson she meant to teach with that, it seems he's learned.

She's pleased with him.

*

They're in the water, bearing weights, in Camelot's river's shallow bed. He could ditch the weights and rise, he _could_ , but pride is a goad, and she drifts beside him, managing. The water stings his eyes, but it's clean enough that he can see a little. (City innocence: until this exercise, he'd never considered that possible, but then again, he grew up by the Tamesis, the city's drain.)

It's times like these he wants to protest: he's a king, not a paragon, and a scion, not a ruler. He was never trained to rise above other men.

They're at fifteen feet - does the river even have that deep a bed? He's _suspicious_ \- and he's at his limit. He tugs the rope between them, then raises his left arm, fingers cocked in an agreed on signal, sees her see it. Her own gesture signals disagreement. He waits, but - involuntarily his lips part, to water. No new air. Abruptly, he sheds his weights, he strikes up -

He reaches air. It tastes like failure.

*

Further down, and longer down, and they truly are in their own world. Their helpers in a boat above cannot see them, only feel the strain on their ropes.

He's learned by heart the difference between water at his lips, and a bubble of her air. The last time they were down here they stayed half an hour, and she fed him air like morsels, bit by bit, making him wait in between each one.

Even when she isn't starving him of air, though, his mind drifts down here, and sometimes recalls itself in a panic, like someone jerking out of sleep. Once she had to go to him and tug hard on his ropes in the signal for their helpers to raise him, because he was too confused to do it immediately for himself. (Only once, but it gave him pause.)

"The farther down we go," she told him, "the more we will be muddled. That we must practice against too."

He remembers that they have more to do than reach the Lady; they may have more to contend with than themselves.

But his own limits are enough. He breaks a further time, when he can't remember if they've been underwater a half of an hour, or closer to full; when he parts his lips on water, expecting air, and chokes on it; when one of the ropes that comes from the boat above slides down towards him, a heavy coil more ominous than any living snake.

(It's no treachery: the other rope tugs a reassurance; and he knows the men above.)

But he still feels sharp panic, still thrashes, and when there is no air at his lips, he reaches for her as he has not done in weeks.

She moves in a swirl - towards him, not away. Their foreheads knock together, and she reaches for him to hold him there. His lips are opening to grab at the air in front of her own lips, but she brings him further. Presses her lips against his. Opens her lips, pressing his open.

And oh, she was hoarding air, somehow, and here it is. It fills him. He's shot through with catharsis and relief. And arousal, intense, a fire blazing from embers tended a long time. He's hard, aching, everything aches, it's only going to last so long - he needs more -

She crushes him to her. She tastes human, utterly unlike the water, utterly familiar - 

She kisses him, and she's the one gasping harsh breaths into his mouth, and he comes almost brutally. She's still kissing him. They're going up - she must have tugged on her own rope, demanded ascent - but she is holding him, and she is slow, very slow, to let him go.


End file.
